Before Facebook, if I lost someone's contact information, and drifted outside of their social circle for a long enough time, chances were I would never ever see or speak to that person again.

Before Facebook, if people wanted to organize conversation and cooperation on an information technology platform, the options were to pay $X00-$X000 for a proprietary system, get lucky enough to know about mailing lists, have someone who knew sysadmin do it basically for free, or have everyone learn how to use something like IRC.

Social networking was an enormous pain in the ass. Facebook was the first platform that actually worked for people. Every subsequent social network took their cues from Facebook, it was a veritable sea change in the state of the Internet.

The problem here isn't Facebook, you'd be having these growing pains with any useful social networking technology platform. It's the unintended consequences of Facebook's universal accessibility. Anybody can use Facebook, and so everybody will. It's the story of technology all over again. Technology is invented, we have a honeymoon phase, then the real marriage begins. We're in the "just had a baby, now we need to get it to a year old so we can all relax" phase.

It'll get better.